Innovation in peripheral economies: the case of Pisa

Abstract

The case of Pisa, Italy, emerges as an effective representation of the possible difficulties and opportunities in the development of HT in peripheral regions, as well as of the challenges and phases that a knowledge-based local economic policy might face. The study by Scuola Sant’Anna (Di Minin et al., 2003) summarizes the results of a three-year empirical analysis of the local HT sector in Pisa. Over 200 firms, mostly very young, have been identified and analyzed in the province of Pisa, where a traditional manufacturing sector is slowly but constantly declining and coexists with an outstanding public research system, which attracts and retains important human resources in the city, generates high-tech start-ups, and attracts external companies to the area. This paper starts by framing the phenomenon analyzed in the Sant’Anna study within the context of the literature dealing with the “paradox” of localization and globalization. The question here is to try and understand how these theories might help explain the growth and limits of the growth of the sector. I will then build a comparison with another case of peripheral development to shed some light on the exceptional case of Pisa. I will conclude by pointing out three policy recommendations that arise from the literature.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 0 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.